1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character display apparatus, and more particularly to a character display apparatus which is suitable for displaying Chinese characters.
2. Prior Art
Recently, personal computers are remarkably widespread. Particularly, specifications of the personal computers used in the Europe and America (hereinafter, referred to as "Western standard type specifications") have become the world-wide standards. Therefore, many superior softwares which meet these specifications have been developed. In addition, these personal computers having the same standard are produced in a large-scale production, so that the price thereof becomes inexpensive.
By the way, it is sufficient to display alpha-numeric characters (i.e., alphabet characters and figures etc.) as display characters in the personal computers having the European and American standard (hereinafter, referred to as "Western standard type personal computers"). Meanwhile, in order to execute softwares for Japanese in such personal computers, a function for displaying the Chinese characters must be required. In this case, it becomes possible to display any Chinese characters by selecting a graphic mode. However, when a text function (i.e., a character displaying function) is executed as described above, it is disadvantageous in that the execution speed must become slow. In addition, there is no compatibility among these softwares. Further, there is a demerit in that it is extremely troublesome to transfer such softwares.
In the above-mentioned computers, one byte code representative of the alpha-numeric characters and one byte data representative of an attribute are stored and then read out as one pair data.
For example, in order to display the Chinese characters etc. other than the alpha-numeric characters, a character code must need more than one byte. Hence, the system for storing the character code and attribute data in a memory must be different from that of the Western standard type personal computers. This causes a problem in that it is impossible to obtain the compatibility between the softwares for Japanese and the softwares of the Western standard type personal computers. In addition, in order to display the Chinese characters etc., it is demanded to further enlarge the attribute function.